IE5.0 does not conform to RFC2376

John Cowan cowan at locke.ccil.org
Fri Apr 9 18:22:11 BST 1999


Chris Lilley wrote:

> MIME actually need not have those constraints; *email* has those
> constraints (although increasingly it does not, in practice). HTTP is
> always 8-bit clean. I agree that the MIME RFCs have steadfastly tried to
> pretend that MIME is an email-only thing.

The requirement for a charset with text/* documents (whether minimized
or not) has nothing to do with email, although the fact that a
minimized charset parameter means "US-ASCII" surely does.

A charset must be specified for interoperable text (as opposed to
application-specific formats) because text means nothing if you
do not know the charset, and no text-using application can fail
to either decode, guess, or simply presume some charset.

-- 
John Cowan	http://www.ccil.org/~cowan		cowan at ccil.org
	You tollerday donsk?  N.  You tolkatiff scowegian?  Nn.
	You spigotty anglease?  Nnn.  You phonio saxo?  Nnnn.
		Clear all so!  'Tis a Jute.... (Finnegans Wake 16.5)

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